This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2008 Spring (Mandriva 2008.1) desktop (with the KDE desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

To fully replace a Windows desktop, I want the Mandriva One 2008 Spring desktop to have the following software installed:

I will use the username falko in this tutorial, and I will download all necessary files to falko's desktop which is equivalent to the directory /home/falko/Desktop. If you use another username (which you most probably do ;-)), please replace falko with your own username. So when I use a command like

The system will now boot into a live system from where you can install Mandriva to your hard drive. Before we can see the live desktop, we have to answer a few questions.

First, choose your language:

Select your country:

Accept the Mandriva license:

Select your keyboard layout:

Select your time. Under Advanced, you can enable Automatic time synchronization (using NTP):

Finally, the live desktop starts. To install Mandriva One 2008 Spring to your hard drive, click on the Live Install icon:

The installation wizard starts. Click on Next:

Mandriva's default partitioning scheme is ok for our purposes, so you can select Use free space (if you want to set up your own partitioning scheme, select Custom disk partitioning instead). Afterwards the hard drive will be partitioned.

Afterwards, the system is being installed to your hard drive. This can take a few minutes, so please be patient:

Afterwards we have to configure the bootloader. The default settings are ok, so we can click on Next:

The default boot menu entries are ok as well, so we click on Finish:

Click on Finish to complete the installation:

To use our new installation, we must reboot and remove the Mandriva CD from our CD drive. Log out of the current desktop session by clicking on the red icon in the lower right corner, then select Restart Computer from the upcoming menu:

The First Time wizard comes up. You can use it to create an account with the Mandriva user community, answer a survey, submit your hardware details to Mandriva, etc.. Click on Next (I have no idea why the system is using Polish in the following screenshot...):

If you don't want to submit any details, click on Decline on each of the following three screens: